The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff Hits Home
An Intense Confluence of Life, Love, Religion and Self Examination
Aug 14, 2009
The 19th Wife had plenty of opportunity to become over-zealous. It could show the fundamentalist ideas being ludicrous, or, alternatively, it could have shown the Mormons as in the right.
Instead, it took a beautiful middle ground, showing the vast grey areas where belief and faith intersect with the rules and ideologies of society. What Ebershoff has done particularly well is set up two different time lines, but both which deal with the difficulty of polygamy and its effects on the people it touches.
A prolific number of themes and sub stories run throughout the novel. Among those are the concepts of family, love, loyalty and faith.
Family and Loyalty in The 19th Wife
The first story is that of the beginning of Mormonism and it's rise and eventual settlement in the deserts of Utah. The reader watches as the believers are led to Zion, a place where men are supposed to marry as many wives as they can support in order to breed more and more Mormons for God. Ann Eliza Young is Brigham Young's nineteenth wife, and it is she who begins the crusade against polygamy.
But prior to her arrival in the story, we follow her mother and father. Her mother is devout, and although horrified at the news that she must do her duty to God by being a multiple wife, the reader cannot help but admire her deep devotion to her faith, as well as to the spiritual health of her family. Nothing she does is without purpose: a purpose devoted to the afterlife.
The second story is that of Jordan, in modern day Utah. He is a child of the polygamous sect of Utah; a young man who was kicked out for holding the hand of a girl who wasn’t (yet) his wife. The fact that Jordan is gay is incidental to the novel, for the most part, which is a masterful stroke on Ebershoff's part. Rather than depict religion as the antithesis of sexuality, it instead acknowledges Mormonism's general issues with sexuality, and deals with the religion/homosexuality issue by looking at Jordan's relationship with another young ex-Mormon who still retains his faith, even in the face of its intolerance.
It is Jordan's relationship with his mother that is the focal point of his story. She is the 19th wife of a man who was murdered. Given his excommunication, Jordan is unwelcome in his old hometown, but he still goes out and tries to prove his mother's innocence in his father's death.
The two stories show a beautiful symmetry between the times, and also show the complexity of familial relationships. Jordan does not give up on his mother, even though she holds strongly to the faith that exiled him. Anne Eliza Young does not stay with her faith because she does not want her children brought up to believe in polygamy.
The Archetypal Search for Oneself in The19th Wife
One of the most striking aspects of this novel is the kind of Odyssian journey of the characters, particularly Jordan.
Jordan lives in his van. He is homeless, gay, directionless except for the job he attempts to hold down until he goes to help his mother. He is clearly on a journey of self discovery, and when he meets a young man who loves him openly, his journey into self truly becomes critical to who he is as a person.
In a similar manner, Anne Eliza Young (and her mother, to some extent) go through the journey of faith, denial, anger and eventual exile from their faith due to its internal hypocrisy. It is through their subjugation that they come to understand their true faith and worth overall.
There is a line in the story that is an excellent encapsulation of the story:
"Imagine, if you will, departing the only world you have ever known--your family, your landscape, your customs, your neighbors, your faith, even if that faith has been shaken. Ponder it: saying goodbye without knowing where you are headed. It would be something like decamping for the moon." (424-425)
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. Black Swan, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-552-77498-7
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